god is not great

Picked by someone in my book club. I laughed when I heard I had to read this because even though I am atheist, I don't really see the point of reading all these books about the subject. I already blogged about may favorite one here. This was a fun one, though. I got it on audio and the man himself reads it. It was like having Richard Burton in my head--not a bad think at all.

I agree with Ophelia at Butterflies & Wheels:

"Christopher Hitchens is a standing reproach to people who write the odd essay now and then. He is like some sort of crazed writing machine, he seems to average three or four longish essays a day, along with reading everything ever written and remembering all of it, knowing everyone worth knowing on most continents, visiting war zones and trouble spots around the globe, going on television and overbearing even noisy Chris Matthews' efforts to interrupt him, and irritating people. And what's even more painful is that this torrent of prose is nothing like the torrents of people like Joyce Carol Oates or Iris Murdoch, badly written in proportion to the torrentiality - no, this is a torrent of learned, witty, informed and informative, searching, impassioned history on the hoof. If Hitchens is a journalist then so were Gibbon and Thucydides."

It was a treat to read this coming from my Lit. major background. I don't necessarily agree that religion poisons everything. I think it's more that ignorance and dogmatism and fundamentalism and superstition poisons everything. But even as virulent as his rhetoric can get, he is still respectful. He covers his head when in temple, removes his shoes in mosques. He has good things to say about Dr. King and the Dali Lama (but bad things to say about the Dali Lama's feudal state).

I especially liked that when he went on tour for the book in his adopted homeland of America (he's an American citizen and lives in Washington, DC) he specifically asked to tour the south and to have theologians invited to debate him at every stop. He was appalled at the lack of biblical literacy he encountered in these debates. The guy knows chapter and verse and puts on an impressive display. Kudos!